Recently I started doing quite a bit of operations stuff at FastCompany, so I decided to write couple articles to illustrate our transition to AWS and later to Chef. There were few bumps on the road, some of you may be able to avoid them by reading these posts .. …

From time to time I need to work with outgoing mails: change templates, make sure they display correct data etc. You could go with some full blown MTA like postfix and it’s actually pretty easy to install and configure for outgoing mail sending. I personally tend to not install MTA on my dev box, …

I was working on import script recently. Expected execution time was more than 60 seconds, the default value of proxy_read_timeout directive in Nginx that’s why Nginx displayed nice 504 Gateway Timeout error every time I run the script, even though the script was still running on the back end. …

Recently I had a problem running Drupal Simpletest on my new i7 dev box. It took couple minutes to execute a set of relatively simple tests and as a developer you probably know how annoying that could be. The problem was largely due to InnoDB storage engine and it slowness caused by creating / removing tables (compared to let say MyISAM). …